Google China’s 2008 Roadmap

At the beginning of July, Kai-fu Lee, president of Google Greater China, said that in 2008 Google China would focus heavily on products popularisation.

Mr. Lee said that the road map for Google’s Chinese-language search is still focussed on an integrated search engine. In the past 12 months, apart from web pages, Google integrated 12 services into its search engine, including news, videos, maps and etc. And Google plans to extend that number to 30 or 50 over the next 12 months. By doing that, users will be able to search different formats of information with a simple search.

Only about 10% of information on the internet is not in Chinese, so it is vitally important for Google to reach their goal of making foreign-language web pages easily available to Chinese users through translation.

The fierce competition between Google and Baidu in the Chinese search area pushes Google China to continuously improve the quality of its search results and it will also make it more user-friendly.